Do you see patterns in your spending, saving, and investing behaviors that mirror those of your parents? Or, have you changed because, perhaps, their behaviors didn’t provide the best illustration of how to successfully manage finances? What types of parental experiences are positively related to a child’s future net worth? What sets of experiences would lead to someone accumulating more than his peers, regardless of income, age, and what what gifted to him? In examining …
I know elementary school teachers, coaches, and your parents told you that all that matters is that you do your best. Unfortunately, they all lied to you. The professor who wrote this was responding to a fictional (albeit realistic) scenario: how would you respond to a student who asked for a grade change on a project because she “worked so hard on it?” The idea that you could work hard on something and not …
With a variety of interests, behaviors, experiences, personalities, and attitudes about money, we manage finances, invest, and save. Even if we are not directly responsible for financial management, we are involved via spending or generating income. How do financial institutions and advisors provide guidance? They divide us up into groups by our age, gender, net worth, income, and maybe some less-than-ideal measure of risk tolerance. The focus on Millennials is a great example of this: …
Friendships need to be cared for like any other precious resource in life. A recent article in USA Today provided a good argument for the fostering and care of friendships. The author cites the importance of ongoing friendships in that they can positively impact life and health: Smarter friends make us smarter; more social friends make us more outgoing; healthy friends make us more health conscious. Who they are becomes part of us. The article left me …
Why do we spend money? Why do we buy things we don’t need or items that are outside of what we can afford? What advice should we heed if we’re trying to improve our ability to walk out of a store with only what we intended to buy? Some argue that gender, ethnic group membership or socio-economic status alone can explain differences in shopping and spending. Like with other areas of research (including affluent …